


I Need You (Like I Need A Hole In The Head)

by Nellie



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Consensual Violence, M/M, Rough Sex, Wall Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-08
Updated: 2011-01-08
Packaged: 2017-10-15 18:11:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/163503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nellie/pseuds/Nellie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Killing each other was meant to be a game. Somewhere along the line, things got serious.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Need You (Like I Need A Hole In The Head)

  
Arthur isn’t prone to hyperbole. He doesn’t know a hundred ways to kill a man. He doesn’t even know fifty. He knows seventeen, and just so happens to have the kinaesthetic intelligence to improvise a dozen more in any given situation. It’s not like he often gets a chance to practice them though... for all his misgivings about the elegance of the act, most of the time shooting someone in the head really is the most efficient way to get the job done.

So, when the zombie-like projections of the troubled investment banker catch up with Eames first, the horde clutching at his clothes and tearing into his flesh, it’s a simple thing for Arthur to look down the barrel of the gun from the fire escape and unload a single, neat bullet into his forehead before climbing onwards to meet Dom at the rendezvous.

“Not that I’m not grateful,” Eames says later, as they pack up the PASIV and clean away every trace of their presence from the hotel room. “But I hope next time you have something more elegant in mind than shooting me in the head.”

He’s smiling, and he mimics the words in something close enough to Arthur’s own accent that there’s no doubt he’s making fun.

Arthur snaps the PASIV shut and makes a last sweep of the room, ignoring the verbal barb as he follows Cobb out the door.

*

They finish their next job with twenty minutes of dream time on the clock, an easy in-and-out. The moon is high in the winter sky, casting stark shadows across the carpark of the skating rink.

Arthur feels the steel concealed in his palm the way he feels the light breeze skittering across the gravel; like something cold and sharp. The sleeves of his acid wash jacket are too long, ragged, and it helps hide the weapon.

Eames is leaning against a beat-up van, looking more like the eighties threw up on him than anyone else had for this job. The soft glow of his cigarette illuminates the planes of his face that the moonlight misses, and Arthur can smell the smoke curling toward him on the air. He can tell when Eames notices him just from how the way he’s standing changes, tension coiling into limbs that were languid seconds before. “It’s just me,” he says as he closes the rest of the distance between them.

His posture relaxes again. “Arthur.” He says the name through a grin, the soft ‘r’ sounds rolling so easily off that British tongue.

It really is cold out, much colder than the warm air of the skating rink where the others are still enjoying the novelty of the 1983 they’d dreamed up. He reaches out, fingertips just barely brushing Eames’s lips as he takes the cigarette and lifts it to his own mouth; eyes closed as the hot smoke thaws his lungs. Eames is watching him intently when he opens them again, and he smiles as he offers the cigarette back. “You did a good job tonight.”

Eames’s reply is a snort, the cigarette flaring bright as he breathes in.

“I mean it,” Arthur says, and he does. He rests a companionable hand on the Eames’s shoulder, leaning close enough to share the smoke.

Eames quirks an eyebrow, but before he can respond, Arthur lets the concealed stiletto slide down in his right hand. He’s close enough that it’s a point blank blow to bring the narrow steel up between the ribs, even if the muscle still gives enough resistance that he has to push Eames back against the van and thrust with the heel of his hand for leverage.

A few seconds of effort, elegant and clean, and Eames doesn’t even have time to hiccup before his eyes go dull. Arthur plucks the cigarette from his slackening mouth just as the blood starts to flow over his lower lip... not quite fast enough, he tastes it when he tucks it back between his own lips, smoke and blood mixing in his mouth as he slides the forger’s body to the gravel.

He finishes the cigarette, watching the blood pool, before crushing it underfoot and heading back inside the skating rink.

*

He hears a familiar voice in his ear almost before he wakes.

“Lovely and elegant, for sure, but hardly imaginative.”

Arthur opens his eyes, but the forger is already helping Ariadne with her IV.

*

It’s raining in the garden, a deliberate ploy to get the mark back inside the castle. A risky one, and Arthur knows it as his feet sink into the soggy grass. There’s maybe ten minutes until the projections catch up with Dom, maybe five before he won’t be able to make it to help in time.

He steps as lightly as he can, letting the rain veil his approach. Eames isn’t watching... he’s soaked through, heavy medieval attire even heavier with the rain, and any second he’s going to turn around, hear some noise.

Arthur can feel the anticipation like a drum in his chest as he slinks closer to that broad back. Slowly he slides his fingers to his thick leather belt, unfastening it and sliding it free. Five minutes, and it’ll take at least two for him to die.

He’s not taking any chances.

There’s only three steps between them now, and surely Eames can feel the warmth of his body, hear his heart beating. It’s almost too easy to slip the looped belt around his neck, pull it taught with the free end.

His hands jerk up to his throat and Arthur presses closer, kicking at the back of one of his knees and tripping them both down onto the muddy lawn. He gets his knee up, digging it into the Eames’s back with every bit of weight he can throw behind it, and pulls.

He counts as Eames thrashes, lightning illuminating the dark cut of the leather into his throat. It’s easier, he reflects, choking a man this way. So long as he keeps his weight centered on his back and the pressure on the belt, even the slickness of the rain can’t stop him the way it could if he was trying to keep his fingers tight against wet skin.

The rain is plastering his hair into his eyes and he can hardly breathe himself as he feels Eames heave beneath him, wracking with the effort to drag in just one, last, impossible breath.

One hundred and eighty-nine seconds later, Arthur slowly loosens the belt from the neck of the limp body beneath him. Deep welts mark the dead throat, the precise width of the leather, and Arthur makes only a cursory attempt to brush the mud from his knees before he tugs the belt back on and races to find Dom before the projections do.

*

“What took you so long?” Dom asks.

Arthur keeps wiping the whiteboard clean. “I had something to take care of.”

Dom doesn’t pry further; he doesn’t have a reason to.

“Now that,” a different voice says behind him, moments after Dom’s footsteps fade away, “was much better. Still room for improvement, but better.”

Arthur ignores him, scrubbing harder at the board.

“The belt was a nice touch. Your hands would have slipped.”

The eraser stills in his hand. “I know.”

The silence feels heavier somehow because he can feel the presence just behind him, and he wonders how close Eames really is, wonders if he should turn to see.

“Keep it up.”

He feels the words against the curve of his ear, and it takes more willpower than he thought it would not to react.

*

He’s taking off his flippers on the beach when Eames walks up and flops down beside him, hair all askew and Hawaiian shirt half undone.

“You’re not meant to be here,” Arthur says, laying the flippers aside and turning his attention to the broken respirator that had caused his hasty retreat from the sunken wreck just off the beach.

“I finished early. You’re not meant to be here, either.”

Arthur holds up the respirator in silent explanation. The sun is beating down, too hot, and sweat is beading along the hollow of his throat and across his shoulders, treading planes barely dry from the ocean. “Dom will be fine. We could see the chest at the bottom of the wreck when I had to pull out.”

Eames leans back, hands digging into the sand, face tipped up to the Caribbean sun. “How long?”

The number is in Arthur’s mind before he even has to think about it. “Six minutes. Eight, depending on how long it takes Dom to crack open the chest.”

“Good.”

Eames rolls, landing deliberate and hard on Arthur’s chest. It takes all the air out of his lungs, but he’s quick enough to get three fingers between Eames’s hands and his throat before Eames settles his full weight against him, hard thighs bracketing his hips and all that heavy muscle crushing him down into the sand.

His free hand is pinned beneath one knee, and Arthur feels the first flutter of panic twisted with sharp arousal in his gut.

“I’ve got you, alright?” Eames murmurs. “I’m just going to show you something.”

He shifts his hands on Arthur’s neck, thumbs lined up across the hard line of his trachea. His fingers slide easily on the skin, through the sweat, gritty from the sand. It’s a harsh contrast, that the hands that had relaxed so easily on this beach moments ago could turn so hard and unforgiving.

Arthur remembers why he should never, ever, underestimate Eames.

Eames leans closer, pushing more air from Arthur’s lungs with the weight of his body. “I’m guessing they showed you this way,” he says, applying enough pressure with his hands for Arthur to feel the grip.

He nods, best he can.

“But if you do it like this,” his fingers shift, and immediately Arthur can feel the strength of the hold, “your fingers won’t move, no matter how slippery your opponent is.”

He’s pressing harder now, throwing the weight of his body behind his hands. He’s doing it slowly enough that Arthur could probably get him off if he tried, used the leverage from the three fingers pressed between those hands and his own neck.

It only takes a second for him to realise that trying is only going to get him some broken fingers for his trouble. Over Eames’s shoulder, the sun is blinding. Arthur stares at it anyway, focuses on the bright, clear blue as rough sand and smooth skin press against his throat, choke off his access to the warm salty air. It’s easier than looking him in the face, even though he does that too for a second... and all he can think is that this is what Eames would look like if he was fucking him. Hair all wild, muscles of his shoulders and neck pulled tight with effort, sweat across his collarbones and forehead.

He doesn’t have time for this. He can feel the burning in his lungs, the desperation kicking in as his brain tries to override every conscious thought with panic. The muscles in his chest spasm, driving his thoughts even further from where they need to be, fighting for the breath that isn’t coming unless he does something _right fucking now.  
_  
Maybe it’s a second or maybe it’s a minute, but it’s taking too fucking long. And he’s died in dreams before a thousand times, but never quite like this. Never quite this agonisingly slow, a black hole turning his lungs inside out. It’s inexorable, like gravity.

Everything comes back to gravity. Especially with the way Eames is leaning forward, all his weight focused down on Arthur’s throat.

Arthur brings his knee up hard; slamming into Eames’s back, rocking him forward. Gravity does the rest and he falls forward.

Arthur underestimated him.

His throat catches Eames’s forearm as he lands, and if he had any air left in his lungs he would have screamed, but he doesn’t, so he can’t.

He dies to the pain of his ruptured trachea, the sensation of Eames panting on his face mocking him all the way down.

*

Arthur rips out the IV, heart pounding, gasping in air like he’s still dying. The pain shouldn’t follow... it shouldn’t, but he runs his hand across his neck anyway, reminding his brain that it wasn’t real and he doesn’t need to feel it anymore.

He’s still breathing too heavily when he hears movement to his right, and glances across at Eames.

The forger smiles, getting up to reel up his line and set it back in the PASIV. Then he turns, and offers Arthur his hand.

Arthur narrows his eyes, fingers still resting at the hollow of his throat. “You’re an asshole,” he hisses, the sound raw against tissues his brain still hasn’t quite realised aren’t actually damaged yet.

Eames shrugs. “Suit yourself.”

Arthur scowls at his back as he walks away.

*

He’s making bad coffee in the kitchenette when Dom finds him after the debrief. Arthur holds up the International Roast can, shaking it vigorously. “It really shouldn’t be solid, should it.”

It’s not a question and Dom knows it, as he sits down at the little table. He’s quiet for a minute, and Arthur doesn’t push. It’s nothing but a relief to see Dom sitting calm for more than two minutes without pulling out that damn top.

The kettle has boiled and Arthur is pouring hot water over clumps of the instant blend before Dom speaks. “I’ve never interfered with your personal life. But I need you to tell me that this...” he gestures vaguely, “whatever that was with Eames, isn’t going to cause problems.”

Arthur sits down and takes a sip, pulls a face, before setting down the mug and meeting Dom’s eyes. “What are you talking about?”

Dom’s eyes narrow. “I got the tablets with the information on them out of the chest, memorised what we needed. I was coming back up to make sure you weren’t being overrun with projections.”

The coffee is fortifying, as bad as it. “He was showing me a better choke hold, that’s all,” Arthur says. “The military was on the money when they designed dream sharing as a training tool.”

Dom doesn’t say anything else, and Arthur wonders if he believed him.

He wonders if he believed himself.

*

He leaves a clean sheet of paper, folded in half, taped to Eames’s full length mirror later.

 _Thanks for the lesson. You’re still an asshole.  
_  
*

The same piece of paper shows up crammed into the back pocket of his moleskine the next day.

 _You’re welcome. As much as I endorse creativity, technique comes first._

*

Arthur flexes his fingers before loosening his tie further. It’s mayhem, shouts littering the air like the paper all over the floor, the hot press of bodies, and he’s pretty sure the mark has seen far too many movies about the New York Stock Exchange. It’s hectic, but not this hectic. He would know. He’s infiltrated it enough times out of necessity.

Through the shifting crowd he never fully loses sight of Eames’s shoulders, filling out that dove-grey business suit in a way very few stock brokers ever would.

He checks his watch. Dom had bailed out of the dream thirty-two seconds ago with all the necessary financial details the mark had hidden in the vault, which gives them maybe two minutes before he kicks them.

His hands hang loose by his sides as he threads through the crowd towards Eames, and he resists the urge to mime out the motions he’s been practising one last time.

The crowd jostles them together when he reaches him, and Arthur anchors himself with one hand on Eames's narrow waist. “Dom’s going to kick us any second now,” he says, mouthing the skin just behind Eames’s ear with the words. Just to be heard.

He smells good.

Eames leans back casually instead of turning around, and it’s far too hot where their bodies touch. “No time to choke me today, is there.”

“No,” Arthur agrees. Pauses. Waits just a little bit longer for the sense of security to solidify as he skims his right hand up along that solid back and into mussed hair, kneading his fingers against Eames’s scalp.

If Eames makes a noise, it’s lost to the cacophony, but Arthur feels the tension seep from the body he’s pressed so closely against.

There. Eames’s head lolls back against the pressure of his fingers, neck slack, and Arthur tightens his grip on the forger’s hair and snaps his head back hard and fast. He’s close enough to hear the crunch over the sounds of the crowd as his neck bends at just the right angle and velocity to dislocate the cervical vertebrae and cut through the spinal cord.

Arthur feels the pulse go, and fuck, Eames is heavy as a dead weight.

He holds him through the kick anyway.

*

“I knew.”

Arthur looks up from the blueprints strewn across the drafting table, and the expression on Eames’s face is breaking between amusement and genuine annoyance. “Oh?”

“I knew because of course you’d only bloody touch me because you were going to kill me, not because you wanted to.”

“Of course.” And if he’d enjoyed the touching too, well, Eames didn’t need to know that. “You can be as technical as you like about breaking someone’s neck, but if they’re as tensed up as you were, you’re not going to get the vertebrae to move in the right direction. Not enough for a clean kill, anyway.”

Eames hmms softly. “It’d be a nasty way to go, a half-arsed cervical dislocation. I suppose I should be grateful you managed to pull it off.” He’s rolling Arthur’s drafting pens across the table, careless of the order they had been in before.

Arthur stops the pens before they clatter off his side of the table. “You should be.”

*

Arthur rolls his shoulders as he surveys the hotel lobby, the gold-veined white marble slick with blood. The silence is too loud after the shoot-out, even with the soft gurgle of the fountain behind them. He lifts one hand to a ringing ear gingerly, and isn’t surprised when it comes away wet with blood to match that pooling on the lobby floor with the piles of dead projections.

“I’m glad I’ve never seen a stand-off like that in reality,” Eames says beside him, and it sounds like his voice is coming from too far away. He’s checking the chamber of his gun, and tucks it into the waistband of his pants when he’s satisfied it’s safe. “Do you think Cobb made it?”

Arthur turns, carefully, nausea creeping up in his stomach. The last few shots were hard to line up straight... maybe a burst eardrum. Not that it’ll matter in a few minutes when the timer runs out. “It’s out of our hands now,” he replies, and sits slowly on the edge of the fountain, loosening his tie and undoing the first couple of shirt buttons.

Warm fingers ghost over his left shoulder. If he turns his head a little, he can see that familiar hand, fresh burns from the bullet casings livid against the tanned skin. “You need to work on your endurance.”

Those fingers dig in, kneading firmly against the tired muscles, dipping inside his open collar to the tension just beneath his clavicle. Arthur can’t bring himself to care, not when it feels so damn good. “If we’d gotten behind the reception desk, like I suggested, I wouldn’t have put a crick in my neck shooting while trying to stay covered behind a fountain,” he says, leaning into Eames’s hand just enough to get those probing fingers onto a particularly tense spot at the junction of his neck and shoulder.

“Luckily, there’s an easy fix for the crick in your neck.”

Arthur knows, right then. He knows, and he tries to turn to block the grapple, throw a punch, but his equilibrium swims and he throws it a foot too wide, past Eames’s ear.

His fingers twist against the armholes of Arthur’s waistcoat, and he’s face down in the fountain before his lacerated inner ear can even work out whether he’s standing up or not. His nose scrapes the tile, blood tainting the water from the broken skin, and he can’t even get enough leverage on the bottom of the fountain with his hands to thrash back with any efficiency.

Trying to protest just gets him a lungful of water, and Eames is leaning over him anyway, holding him down with a knee on the small of his back and hands in his hair.

The water doesn’t even cover his ears. This is not happening. He bloodies his nose thrashing against the tile, cursing until the air in his lungs runs out and pain streaks through muscles trying their best to work anaerobically but failing miserably.

Suffocating isn’t any easier the second time round.

*

Eames is standing in the back courtyard of the house they’d rented for the job by the time Arthur is finished cleaning up, nothing but a silhouette and the ember glow of a cigarette under the moonless sky.

Arthur closes the sliding glass door behind him, barefoot and silent as he leans his hip against the delicate wrought iron table in the middle of the courtyard. “I was disorientated,” he says, holding out his hand and gesturing impatiently for the cigarette.

Eames hands it over, digging in his shirt pocket for a fresh one. “I know.”

Arthur leans in close to let Eames light the new cigarette from the end of his, breathing deep to make it flare. He lets out the breath more slowly as Eames straightens up. “It doesn’t count.

He makes a noise that’s half way between a laugh and a snort, smoke curling from his nose. “You’re just being precious because I drowned you in water that wasn’t even deep enough for you to get the back of your neck wet.”

“You could have just shot me,” Arthur says, the sharp edge in his voice made rough by the gentle burn of smoke and nicotine.

“Maybe. But that would mean I was only touching you because I wanted to, and not because I was going to kill you.”

The smoke and the silence drift between them, until Eames crushes the butt of his cigarette underfoot and heads inside.

*

“You’re setting a dangerous precedent.”

Dom’s voice is more fatherly concern than reproach, and Arthur can’t decide which he’d actually prefer. He keeps his eyes on the dry landscape rolling by out the train window. “Everything is going right, isn’t it?”

“You know what I mean.” Dom sighs, and Arthur feels him fidget in the seat next to him. “Every time you two work together. Are you setting the timer forward just so you have time to play your game?”

Arthur turns around. “Of course I’m not. Jesus, Dom. You think I don’t know what a stupid idea it is to stay under any longer than we have to?”

 _We’re just getting faster_ , he thinks, when Dom holds up his hands and shakes his head, turning his attention back to his newspaper. He’d set the last timer back, and still caught up to Eames with enough time to eviscerate him with a few quick cuts.

He flexes his fingers and turns back to the window, still feeling the throb of that heartbeat slowing to a stop as he splayed his hand on Eames's chest and twisted the knife.

*

They’re barely half an hour into the next job when Arthur has to shoot Cobb between the eyes, a quick mercy compared to how long it would take him to die twitching with the back of his skull caved in. The gunshot rings loud in the abandoned street and he winces, hoping it doesn’t bring the attention of any more violent projections like the one lying dead beside Cobb with the crowbar still clutched tightly in its hand.

“There are projections fighting in the causeway. Can’t go down that route,” Eames says behind him, his own voice instead of the thick American accent tainted with Russian on the vowels that he’d been using along with the face of the subject’s brother.

Arthur shrugs, angry, pulling the Beretta’s trigger just to hear it click uselessly. “Why aren’t you wearing Pruszynski?” He throws the gun down beside Cobb’s body. “We can still pull this off, if I get to the park and—“

“I will bet you anything right now that if the subject is so paranoid his own projections are trying to kill each other, not even you are going to get through what his mind has come up with to defend those secrets. _Shit._ ”

The curse is accompanied by a low, pained groan, and Arthur turns. Eames is busy trying to pick chunks of broken glass out of a gaping gut wound with his left hand, tendons showing shiny white against red in the limp wrist of his right. There’s gravel stuck in his cheek, both eyes swollen, and Arthur allows himself a moment to be impressed with the fact that he not only came out on top of the brawl that ended with him looking like that, but that we was still walking and talking too. “I’m empty. Sorry.”

Eames grins, teeth stained red with blood. “Lovely thing about dreams, you know—“

But Arthur is shaking his head. “I can still do this, but not if we bring more hypersensitive projections down on us. We change nothing.”

“I am telling you, you can’t. You really can’t.” There’s a thick puddle forming on the asphalt where the blood is dribbling steadily between the fingers clenched over his stomach, down the line of his wrist, dripping to the ground.

“You don’t know that,” he says, stripping off his coat and bunching it up, taking the few steps to close the distance between them.

Eames takes an unsteady step back. “No, you can’t. You’re on your own. The route we planned is cut off. You can’t do anything without bringing the projections down on you, and believe me, a mind this paranoid is going to be sending them after you in waves before you get within spitting distance of the park.”

They stare at each other, the smell of blood thick in the still air. Arthur holds out his coat. “Lie the fuck down and let me do this, okay?”

Eames lifts his good hand, slick with his own blood, splaying his fingers in the air deliberately. “No,” he says , eyes never leaving Arthur’s. “Here, I can do it mysel—“

Arthur’s punching him before he can finish the word, hitting a particularly brutal bruise already spreading under his left eye. The strike jars his shoulder, knuckles throbbing, but Eames goes down.

He spits blood onto Arthur’s shoes and laughs. “It’s not going to happen, Arthur.”

This team hasn’t failed a job since the inception, and Arthur isn’t about break the streak over a contrary forger. He leans down, grabbing Eames under the shoulders and dragging him through a string of curses to the curb. “Bite it,” he says through gritted teeth, looking around for any projections that had gotten bored with the brawl in the causeway and come looking for the real threat. The dreamer. Him.

“You have got to be kidding,” he says, ragged, and Arthur can hear the pain in it now.

“Why would I be? You get to wake up, I get a chance to fix this mess. Do it.”

“I only wake up if you do it right, and I don’t like the alternative.”

Arthur crouches down, running his fingers through Eames’s hair once before grabbing hold. “Do. It.”

Slowly, he shifts, lets Arthur position his jaw on the concrete.

“Don’t fuck it up,” he warns, muffled, as Arthur shifts his weight and gauges the angle meticulously.

He brings his foot down on the back of his head, hard, the crunch accompanied by the rattle of broken teeth across the asphalt.

Arthur runs from the spreading blood.

He’s not even in sight of the park when the projections beat him down and tear him to pieces.

*

He’s still cursing two days later at the safe house, gathering up all the research he can on the interactions between Somnacin and various mental instabilities that could go undiagnosed. Not surprisingly the military hadn’t been interested in getting the drug anywhere near anybody who hadn’t passed stringent medical checks to avoid that sort of thing, and the rest of the literature is disappointingly anecdotal.

Access to a real kitchen and real coffee take the edge off his mood a little though, even if it’s three a.m and he’s barely slept since they botched the job; every little sound grating at instincts still raw from failure and horrible death. He’d have his gun on him, if he didn’t know it was a stupid idea when he was feeling so jumpy and if there was even anywhere comfortable to keep it while wearing a tshirt and pyjama pants.

He’s just leaving the French press to steep when Eames wanders into the kitchen, all shirtless muscle and drawstring pants riding scandalously low on his hips. He scratches his hair, taking in the scene. “Most people would say drinking coffee at this time of the morning is a bad idea,” he observes.

“I’m not most people,” Arthur snaps, opening and closing cupboards looking for the chocolate cookies he was sure Ari had left behind last time she’d been here.

“That you aren’t. Is there enough for me?”

“No.”

“Have you slept today?”

“No.”

“Are you planning on it?”

Arthur spins around, and Eames is so close, so disconcertingly close behind him, he can feel the warmth from his skin. “The pot of coffee says no,” he says, bracing his hand against Eames’s bare chest, intending to push him away.

There are strong fingers around his wrist before he can do it, holding his hand in place. “You know, I was beginning to think you really didn’t have any imagination. If it’s not shooting, it has to be stabbing or strangling in all different flavours,” his lips twitch in a smile. There’s no blood in it this time, but Arthur has seen him rubbing at his jaw more than once over the last two days. “But that was interesting.”

His fingers loosen, but Arthur leaves his hand pressed against his chest. He’s felt that heartbeat stop so many times now, but never quite this close, pulse pounding beneath intact muscle and bone, through skin on skin. “I do what I need to do. Next time don’t get in my way.”

“I think I need to get in your way more often.”

Arthur raises an eyebrow when he feels a warm hand on his hipbone, fingers he’s only ever felt digging in to his throat before slipping beneath the cotton. He runs his own hand down the tense muscles of Eames’s stomach, and he knows he’s breathing fast and he can’t help it.

Just giving in and kissing him is starting to feel like a dangerously good idea. So Arthur punches him instead.

Bright crimson splatters the white tile from the force of the blow, and Eames grimaces at Arthur through the split lip as he straightens up, tonguing the wound before sucking on his lower lip. It’s obscene, and Arthur wants to punch him all over again for the tug he feels low in his stomach.

“No,” Arthur says, flexing his throbbing hand. “You need to stay _out_ of my way.

*

Arthur sees Dom casting questioning looks between them for the next few days, but he doesn’t press for information and Arthur doesn’t volunteer any.

Eames spends the week unable to keep his tongue in his mouth, poking at his fat lip.

*

“You need to bury that hatchet,” Dom says a few months later, the first time they’ve all worked together since the botched job.

Arthur types a little harder. He’d thought the looks he’d been throwing towards Eames’s corner of the suite had been fairly subtle. Obviously not. “We’ll be ready for a practice run tomorrow,” he says, deliberately deflecting.

“Look, Arthur,” and there’s the dad voice, the one Arthur still can’t help but take seriously even though he’s twenty-nine years old and doesn’t need Dom to coddle him. “I still don’t know what the hell you and Eames have been playing at for the last year, but don’t pretend nothing’s wrong. I noticed months ago. Ariadne asked what was going on yesterday.”

Arthur keeps typing, eyes focused on the screen. “I’ve got it under control.”

He hears the sharp intake of breathe behind him, as if Dom were about to say something else, but thought better of it.

“Promise me it won’t affect the job.”

It’s a stupid request, and Arthur’s fingers still on the keyboard. “You know it won’t.”

“Just checking.”

*

Arthur’s busy being impressed by the cocktails his subconscious is capable of making up despite knowing next to nothing about mixing drinks when he feels a warm hand on his shoulder, the shift in the air as someone moves into the space beside him at the bar. Eames still smells good, even in dreams, but Arthur knocks his hand away anyway. “Fuck off,” he says, gesturing to the barman for another drink. “I don’t really feel like being drowned in an ashtray of scotch or something today.”

Eames just laughs, like it’s a joke, and rests his hand lightly on Arthur’s hip. “Don’t worry. Today I’m only touching you because I want to.”

The crowd in the club has gone suspiciously quiet, muted. Arthur lifts the glass the barman slides to him, tossing it back while he considers the warm weight of Eames’s hand on his waist. “Do you want me to punch you?”

“Only if _you_ want to. And from what your projections were telling me fifteen minutes ago, that’s not what you want at all.”

Arthur slams the glass down, the thump loud in the sudden absolute silence. “You’re an asshole,” he hisses, shaking off the arm curled around his lower back and standing up. Eames still looks mildly amused, and it just makes him fucking angry. “You don’t have any right to go—“

“Well, you won’t tell me anything yourself,” Eames tilts his head, frowns as he plucks the cherry from Arthur’s empty cocktail glass and chews on the stem. “Last I checked we were having some fun, but somewhere along the line it got really fucking personal and I didn’t know why.”

Arthur’s breathing hard. The crowd of projections are a menacing press behind him, and it’s taking actual effort not to let them descend like vicious harpies and rip Eames apart. “Let’s take this outside.”

He watches as Eames eyes the projections warily before standing up. “Okay.”

They’re barely outside the back door, only a step or two into the dingy alley before Arthur throws the first punch.

He’s not expecting the punch back, square to the jaw, hard enough to set his ears ringing. He knew Eames was strong... he’d seen plenty of evidence of that before. But shit, he punches like a dirty boxer with nothing to lose, like he wants to knock Arthur’s brains out through the back of his skull.

It _hurts._

“Is that better, Arthur?”Eames says, wiping blood from his nose with the back of his hand. “Can we call it even now?”

“ _No_ ,” Arthur says, shaking out his fists before taking another swing. Eames is ready this time, though, and blocks it before shoving him back against the stained brick.

“What the fuck are you fighting against?”

His hands are tight on Arthur’s lapels, scrunched in the fabric so tight Arthur can barely breathe. Arthur stills for a second, taking in the hard press of Eames’s body against his, the raw stink of blood and trash and stagnant water.

“You,” he gets out finally, and it’s true. It’s so fucking true in every sense of the word. Not even drowning felt as inevitable as the idea that eventually, soon, they were going to do this. Stand so close there’s no space left between them, breathe the same air, and...

Later, Arthur will swear it was Eames who closed the last few inches between them. All that matters at the time is that their lips are suddenly pressed together. There’s blood in the kiss, the slick flow of it from Eames’s bloody nose and his own split lip. He bites down hard the first time Eames tries to slide his tongue in before relenting, head falling back against the brick.

Eames shifts his hands, bracing them above Arthur’s head, and Arthur takes the opportunity to get his hands under the back of his shirt, drag his nails across the small of his back.

“Fuck,” Eames hisses into his mouth, hips slamming forward at the sharp pressure.

Arthur pushes back. It’s pure instinct, grinding forward for friction, digging his nails in harder as pleasure spikes along his spine.

“Do you know what they said? Your projections?” Eames murmurs, bringing a hand down to tangle in Arthur’s hair.

He doesn’t. He isn’t sure he wants to. “You’re going to tell me anyway.”

Eames gives his hair a sharp tug, and Arthur bites down on Eames’s lip at the pain instead of his own. “Touch me because you want to,” he mimics, breathy and low and altogether too much like Arthur actually sounds for comfort. “Hold me down, but not to kill me. Hurt me, mark me, do it because you want to-- shit, Arthur.”

He grabs Arthur’s wrists and lifts them above his head, pressed against the brick so he can’t scratch anymore. Arthur could probably stop him, if he wanted. Probably. “Own me,” he finishes for Eames, on a harsh whisper. “Because you want to fuck me until I don’t even know my own fucking name.”

Eames stares at him, eyes wide. “Yeah,” he says roughly, spreading Arthur’s legs with his knee. “That’s what they said.”

The rough brickwork scrapes Arthur’s knuckles when Eames pushes his hands back harder. “Fucking do it then,” Arthur growls, rocking against the hard thigh between his legs.

Eames runs his tongue along Arthur’s pulse, sucking just below the curve of his jaw. “Wait for it, sweetheart. You’ve been making me do it for months now.”

But even as he says it one hand is sliding down between them, undoing the button and zip on Arthur’s slacks, slipping inside to brush his erection and squeeze his balls just hard enough for it to feel really fucking good.

“Eames,” he gasps, and he’s not even sure what he’s asking for anymore.

Arthur keeps his hands against the wall even when Eames lets go to drag off Arthur’s pants, lifting one foot and pulling off the shoe and then the other. The brick is even rougher on his bare ass than it is on his hands, and he squirms while Eames opens his own fly and tugs down his jeans just far enough to get his cock out. “Wait for it,” he mutters again, curling his hand under Arthur’s right knee and coaxing it up to wrap around his waist, running his fingers along the back of that pale thigh.

Eames isn’t giving enough room for any leverage, but Arthur rocks against him as well as he can anyway while he slides fingers that are far wetter than they should be up to the cleft of his ass. Two work inside him easily, and Arthur groans. “If we get swamped by projections because you were fucking around dreaming up lube, I will kill you. I will _actually_ kill you.”

Eames’s laugh is short and sharp, a hot exhalation of breath by his ear. “Is that so.”

“It’s a dream,” Arthur gets out, torn between rocking forward against Eames’s cock or down onto his fingers. “Just fuck me.”

Warm hands slide down to the backs of his thighs, and in one quick motion Eames lifts him up and thrusts in, slamming him back against the brick. And yeah, it’s just a dream, it’s all mind over matter, but that first barely-prepared thrust still fucking hurts. “I hate you,” he grits out, digging his fingers into Eames’s shoulders, face pressed to the crook of his throat as he adjusts to the thick press of his cock inside him.

“Sure you do,” Eames mutters, shifting his grip on Arthur’s thighs and pulling out, slow, pushing back in just as slowly.

Arthur’s about to protest, about to bite his neck hard enough to make him bleed and tell him to fucking _fuck him_ already, when he shifts his grip once more and that’s it, that’s the angle he needs to get a good rhythm going. It only takes a few seconds before Arthur’s lower back is scraped raw against the brickwork, every brutal thrust driving his skin across the rough stone.

“Like that?” Eames pants, and Arthur can feel the precome wet between their stomachs as they rub together.

Arthur bites down in response and tastes blood that isn’t his own as he comes, thighs shuddering in Eames’s hands.

A few seconds later, he can feel the heavy weight of his favourite Glock in his right hand, there on his whim. Arthur lifts the muzzle to Eames’s temple, and Arthur feels his hips falter in their rhythm.

“Just like that,” he whispers, throat hoarse.

And he pulls the trigger.

*

“Smoke?”

Arthur glances across at Eames, just as bundled up against the winter chill as he is. There’s a light dusting of snow on the curb, glistening in the moonlight. “Sure,” he says, holding out his hand after Eames fishes out the packet of cigarettes and lights the first one.

They smoke in silence for a few minutes before Eames speaks. “You owe me an orgasm.”

Arthur takes a deliberate drag, looking up at the moon as he breathes out smoke. “I suppose I do.” He doesn’t shy away when Eames presses his free hand against the base of his spine, right where he can still feel the pain from the bloody scrapes that had been there a couple of hours earlier.

“You suppose nothing, you twat. At least one. Maybe two, for my trouble.”

“Uh-huh,” Arthur says. It’s inevitable. As inevitable as drowning, as inevitable as a back-alley fuck. That doesn’t mean he’s going easy. “It’s cold out. We could share a cab. If you admit something.”

“Like what?”

“That sometimes,” Arthur says, leaning back into the solid pressure of Eames’s hand, “shooting someone in the head really is the most elegant solution.”

Eames smacks him in the back of the head, grinning as he steps forward to hail a cab.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [HERE](http://community.livejournal.com/dream_exchange/18962.html) as part of Dream_Exchange.
> 
> The idea of Arthur and Eames playing some kind of game with killing each other was seriously the first real fic thought I had after I first saw the movie. I started playing with this fic a while ago and could never really make it all come together, but when I got called in to pinch hit for Dream Exchange the recipient's kink list just got me thinking down these lines again, and here we are. It was so fucking hard to write, and the ending is COMPLETELY different to what I intially envisioned, but yeah.


End file.
